You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast.

Over the four-week summer break between issues of the paper,

the podcast is taking a virtual tour of a few places in Europe,

through readings of pieces that have appeared in the LRB in recent months.

This week, Lydia Davis reads her piece on Arl from the latest issue of the paper.

The reading was recorded for the Trilling Lecture at Columbia University in 2019.

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forward slash travel. That's lrB.m.m. forward slash travel and start your

subscription with a 79% discount. What I will be reading tonight is a relatively small part of an

ongoing piece of writing which I could describe most factually as being

the elaborated notes of what I've been learning and discovering in my exploration of the

history of the French city of Aral, a history which goes back about 2,700 years, so there's a lot

to read. The piece of writing began as notes taken during a visit to Aral last November,

when I noticed how within the small area of the old city over the centuries of occupation

by different cultures densely enclosed, so many of the structures were reused, rebuilt, enlarged, et cetera.

This repetitive progression being the only way the changing cultures could adapt for their own

needs, the same limited space.

The nuns of Santa Clara, for instance, after rehabilitating earlier monastic buildings just outside the city walls, which they had taken over from an earlier order, and this was in about, I think,

the 1300s, were forced 100 years later by the city to leave them,

at which point the city destroyed the buildings and used the resulting debris of stone and sand

...